Why I Believe in God

Humans innately desire to know if there's more to life than just human experiences. Can these yearnings be satisfied by a relationship with God? 

Questions for Discussion and Personal Reflection

  1. Do you ever feel that there has to be something more than just the human experience?
  2. Why do you think we seek out experiences that make us feel comparatively small?

Uh, I know that there's a God because of my own personal experience of God, my experience of, of his grace and his forgiveness, uh, my experience of reading the word and it doesn't just read as a, as an ancient document or a text book or the like. I don't even read it like it's just a manual to life. It, it comes alive to me. I hear God speak to me through it. Uh, Jesus and his life, his words, his teachings have described or explains to me what God is really like. God is like Jesus. It's an extraordinary idea. Uh, but I would also want to suggest that the sense that there has to be something more than just our, our human experience I think is, is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. I mean, go to the zoo. What animals do people want to see? They, they want to see the bears and the, and the, the, the lions and the tigers. Uh, you know, in, in my country sharks are a big deal, sharks and whales. People want to encounter them. They stand on headlands or they go out to whale watching. Um, people want to be in a place where they're reminded of the fact that they are not the greatest or most important thing in the world. I mean, why are people drawn to mountains or to, to ocean vistas or to, to raging rivers or canyons? Uh, there is a yearning within the human psyche to be freed from the folly of imagining that the human experience is the highest or the greatest experience that they can be, and, and in our, in our innate or unconscious way by seeking out experiences where we feel small, they're ways of affirming that that anxiety we, we have that the human the experience is the ultimate, is the highest. I'm not saying that that's religious faith per se. I am saying to me that's an inkling or an indication of the fact the we can't bear the idea that we are it, that this is as good as it gets, that the,the human experience is the highest evolution possible. Uh, we have to believe that there's something greater, something beyond, something more important to us. And I, and I would say for me these are fundamental yearnings, and they're absolutely and totally satisfied— at least from my experience— absolutely entirely satisfied in a relationship with God, the one who reveals himself, yes, to be greater and more extraordinary than us, but also he's revealed to us in human form in the person of Jesus.